DOD plans to start offering net-centric services in July

The Defense Department's Net-Centric Enterprise Services will start offering some basic services to the military by next July, according to Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency.

A DISA effort, NCES will make use of Web services and a service-oriented architecture to offer DOD offices a set of core applications, such as collaboration, messaging, storage and authentication. The set of interdependent applications will be available to users of DISA's Global Information Grid. Users will also be able to make their own applications available through this architecture, said Raduege, who spoke last week at the Network Centric Operations 2004 conference in Atlantic City, N.J.

'Once we have large, IP-based intranets, [and] once we have the capability for most DOD users to publish and subscribe, then the real action begins,' Raduege said.

Last July, DISA was given the go-ahead to develop the NCES framework, and by next July the agency plans to offer a basic set of services, according to Raduege. The first service areas to be ready would be collaboration, security and discovery.

As with any large project, 'you have to prioritize the work, and so that is what we put up front,' Raduege said.

To help develop these capabilities, DISA will start holding field tests twice a year, called Oktoberfest, to be held each fall, and Springfest, each spring. The first Oktoberfest, which actually will be held in November, will demonstrate how NCES services can support end-to-end situational awareness and global strike capabilities.

'These experiments are going to demonstrate the pilot NCES services running over our GIG bandwidth expansion node sites,' Raduege said. 'They are a step in the evolution of ' net-centric operation and warfare across the entire Department of Defense.'

About the Author

Joab Jackson is the senior technology editor for Government Computer News.